


The Taste of Ink

by Colourofsaying



Category: due South
Genre: Introspection, M/M, Piercings, Tattoos, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-07
Updated: 2011-12-07
Packaged: 2017-10-27 00:47:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/289721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Colourofsaying/pseuds/Colourofsaying
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is 800 words of unashamed tattoo kink introspection, with a brief foray into earring kink at the end.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Taste of Ink

**Author's Note:**

  * For [masterofmidgets](https://archiveofourown.org/users/masterofmidgets/gifts).



He is surprised by Ray’s tattoo – surprised is a good word, perhaps a better word than his reaction deserves. It’s perfectly reasonable for Ray to have a tattoo, for a human mark to – to _mar_ his human body. It is unreasonable, therefore, for Fraser to hate it so. He wants to erase it, to cover it – he wants to lick it. The latter gives him pause, and he smothers the impulse in speech.

Until the incident involving the pirates, he had had little difficulty forgetting the expanse of Ray’s back in the blue shadows of the locker room, erasing the way his skin had stretched over bone. His hand on that skin brings forth the memory in startling clarity, his mouth on Ray’s recalls a thousand unrecognized impulses and fantasies. It is improper to say he forgot; he cannot forget. He _repressed_. Folded up and tucked away and flattened down. Words should be used correctly. If this one gives him an uneasy sensation, it is the inevitable result of an interest in psychology during his youth, and nothing else. Words are not responsible for the ways people use them. And Ray is not responsible for Fraser’s inexplicable reaction to a perfectly innocuous tattoo.

It’s not that Ray has been marked by another person, Fraser thinks. Ray is covered in marks, both physical and mental. He is scarred, scraped, bruised, and often, at least in Fraser’s company, bloodied, a source of guilt on sleepless nights. His mind is full of other people’s unintentional traces, too, people who have changed him and wounded him. Fraser doesn’t want to press his own imprint into Ray until every thought bears his echo. Well, not much. Well. Not often. Only when he feels like Ray is already looking past him.

Compared to these, the tattoo is, if anything, Ray’s mark upon himself. Whoever put it there was merely an instrument of Ray’s will – he is fairly certain that most artists in this particular field would be slightly appalled. It is crude and simplistic, a _logo_. For an object which is itself unpleasing to the ear and tongue, no matter how useful it may be.

He hates to admit it, but it is evocative of his partner in its rawness. Ray is not – the word ‘raw’ implies unfinished, which Ray is not except in the sense that he lacks the coat of veneer, the polish, that would protect him from the wear of life. As a metaphor, woodworking is lacking. It gives the shell of meaning, but not the heart of it, and consequently fails to fulfill its purpose. He can never find the words for Ray.

It is difficult. He still wants to taste ink that is only a memory.

It does not help that now, with the chill smoothness of Ray’s skin an ineradicable sensation on his palm, he sees Ray before him whenever he closes his eyes. In this – this vision, Ray is tangled in moonlight, the bare skin of his torso almost as white as the sheets he is wrapped in. There is no compromise in the moonlight – there is black and there is white, and the edge of the tattoo that Fraser can see gnaws at him in its clarity until he turns the mental Ray on his side, hides the tattoo from view. There is no rest in this, either, in Ray’s unmarked unearthliness. Nobody looks quite human by moonlight, Fraser knows, but Ray, even in his imperfect image, looks less human than most. Perhaps it is because he is _more_ human than most. An overly romantic view, but undeniable.

The image usually goes away shortly after Fraser returns it to its original state, as if his mind is smugly proving a point, or his subconscious is disappointed that he refuses to pursue the image of a naked Ray in his bed to the inevitable conclusion. Eventually, he manages to banish it for the most part, rarely surprised by a reoccurrence. Of course, shortly after he is congratulating himself on yet another repression well-managed, Ray, in his infinite wisdom, comes in to work with a pierced ear.

It is, in many ways, worse than the tattoo. While the tattoo haunts him, it is rarely present, and though he knows things hidden often have more effect than things on display, it seems that hidden things can also be forgotten for hours at a time, and this cannot. Fraser wonders what Ray would do if he – the warmth of Ray’s shirt under his hands, and then the muscles of his arms, the taste of the gold and the forgotten ink on his tongue. He knows he should leave, but he promised. And perhaps it is impossible now – every time he thinks of leaving, all he can see is a flicker of gold.


End file.
